Advanced Drawing

The course objective is to advance through drawing students\’ visual skills in artistic representation and creative imagination.
Assigned and generated by students projects will focus on both natural and built environment, as well as on emotional perception, bodily experience and metaphoric interpretation of landscape.
This course will be mastering technical and artistic skills in hand drawing, refine sensitivity to all details of what one sees, and develop capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form. Projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places and drawing of life models.
In the process of drawing students we will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade and values. We will use various tools, materials and artistic techniques including: pencils, vine charcoal, conte pastels, markers, ink and other media, later combined with the use of camera, press imagery, computer renderings, etc. Drawing projects may include:

  • Emotional Landscape: Drawing of Imaginary landscapes that invoke distinct emotional states, moods, temperaments and existential conditions: Anger, fear, sadness, loneliness, pain, joy, happiness, pleasure, prosperity, poverty.
  • Strange and Uncanny Landscape: Drawing of a landscapes with new unexpected, foreign, and strange elements added to them and aspects that “ought to be hidden but came to light”.
  • Atmospheric Landscape: Creation of drawings of landscapes in various atmospheric states fog rain, sunny, at night, during the day, and in various seasons.
  • Time and Experience landscape: Observation and visualization of the landscape that changes in time. Learning how to make a visual notation representation of experiencing landscape as a process that unfolds in time. This project will explore the relation of drawing to the visual methods of representation of time and events such as notation, charts, graphs, pictograms, diagrams, and storyboard.
  • Bodily Landscape: Drawing of the relation between human forms gestures and motion and forms of landscape preceded by drawing of a human body in action in space and experimentation with performative (bodily action driven) methods in making drawings.
  • Social Landscape: Drawing exploration of social relations of landscape, events, crowds, vehicular, pedestrian traffic and visual traffic of signs and media advertising day and night.

During the course references will be made to historical approaches to landscape as in:
Tang Dynasty (L. Sixun, L.Zhaodao),
Renaissance, (P. Bruegel),
Romanticism (T. Cole, C.D._Friedrich),
Cubism (Cezanne),
Expressionism (E, Munch),
Surrealism (S.Dali),
Realism (G. Courbet, J.M.W Turner),
Land/Earth Art (R. Smithson),
Feminist Art (Ana Mendieta, P. Chang), and others.